MeghanIsMe

Kate's recent comment and my electronics tinkering reminded me of great-grandfather and his ham radio interests. Some years ago I wondered if I could find his call sign, but cursory searching did not turn it up. I looked again today, and then Miriam did some looking too. Together we found him!

She found this Caltech Newsletter: https://campuspubs.library.caltech.edu/2401/1/1982_07_16_04.pdf
Page 8 mentions my great-grandfather, Hubert Woods', leading role in Caltech's amateur radio club receiving it's first call sign, 6UE, in 1923. He got his bachelor's degree from CalTech (I have his physical diploma!).

Looking in HathiTrust, I'm pretty sure I found him in the US Department of Commerce's publication of 1920-23 amateur radio stations! It's on page 82 of this document: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b3221805...

It's interesting that there are two Hubert Woods. One address, the 1300 block of San Pasqual in Pasadena, is on the CalTech campus. It might make sense if that was the Caltech ham club's call sign, but it's different. I wonder if the Glendale address was where he lived. Maybe my family knows where he lived in California? So in 1923, Caltech had 6UE, and 6ID and 6BS were assigned to Hubert Woods.

And then Miriam found a letter he wrote to the editor of the RSGB Bulletin, which was the Journal of the Radio Society of Great Britain. That's on page 400 of this scan of the 1965 journal:

https://worldradiohistory.com/UK/RadCom/60s/RadCom-1965-06.pdf

He was writing from Northfield Illinois, which is consistent with him having worked for Portland Cement at the time. His callsign at that point was W9IK. I think that might be because many (all?) ham licenses were revoked during World War 2, and hams got new ones after.

I believe he operated in Mexico after retiring and moving to Guadalajara. I wonder if he had a different callsign there.

But anyway, it's really awesome to finally find his callsigns!

I just saw an image of Macaulay Culkin wearing a shirt that has Marcel Duchamp's "R. Mutt" signature from his piece called "Fountain." Suddenly, I like him a lot more! I think that takes a particular kind of bent sense of humor and history that I appreciate.

The more I think about this, the more I wish I could ask him whether the potential layers of meaning there are coincidental. Do you think Culkin could be comparing himself to a sort of ready-made art piece that was unexpectedly pushed into public view and rejected by elites?
Or is he just being silly and likes classy references to urinals?
The world may never know.

Today is Casimir Pulaski day! I'm not very interested in in military history and historical figures (sorry cmcmck; it's just not my area of interest), but Pulaski in particular is really interesting to me because he was likely intersex. Given the privacy that surrounds matters of sex and gender, it's a rare thing to have such strong evidence about a historical figure's non-binary sex. It makes a real difference for people in the modern age to know that intersex folks have been around through all of history.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/was-revolutionary-war-hero-casimir-pulaski-intersex-180971907/

In an interview on NPR, Carol Gluck, professor of Japanese History at Columbia, made a statement whose profundity struck me immediately. Politicians, she said, don't deal with history; they deal with memory. There's so very much there to think about and apply to numerous areas of interest.

My class tomorrow was cancelled (or more accurately, rescheduled into dinner this past Wednesday), so I don't have to leave the apartment tomorrow. I do have to get back to my daily four hours of RA research, and there are weekly class assignments I need to spend time on too. But it will be nice to have another day to work without being interrupted by going to campus for a three hour seminar. I'll probably take a quick trip to the drug store at some point though. I have a $10 gift certificate for having moved in (I'm not sure why it took so long to get here....) and it's for a drug store that I hadn't even known was nearby. It's near the grocery store at triple dollar corner, which actually has the family size vegetable lasagnas that Danae and I like. They're one of the few things that the grocery store I'm going to now doesn't have, so that's convenient.

Speaking of Danae, she's going to be flying in to the Syracuse airport on Wednesday! I lose track of time; I'd forgotten that until my dad mentioned it on Skype this weekend. I'm so very happy to be spending a week and a half with her! I'm also feeling a little nervous about getting around. She doesn't bike, and as I've thought more about her visit, I've realized that Syracuse doesn't seem to be the easiest place to get around without a car. A city or town can offer very different experiences depending on your mode of transportation. I'm going to further ponder the bus system map this week.

I want to write some more about my thoughts and feelings instead of all the daily-doings stuff I've been writing, but a lot of that is tied up in school. So, I'm going to post another Forevertron picture, and then write about my poli-sci paper work. Feel free to ignore that if it's uninteresting.





This is the wing of one of the many metal birds that stand in flocks around the Forevertron. There are a number of things I love about this. The way these blades have been repurposed into something as delicate as feathers; it has a swords-to-plowshares feel. The repeated shapes and lines draw me in too, as does the blue of the sky on bare metal juxtaposed with the browns and reds of rust (assisted a touch in my post-processing).

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Other than going grocery shopping, I spent a lot of today trying to frame out my poli-sci term paper and looking for sources. I've never tried tor ead through the Congressional Record before, so some time went into figuring out how it's organized, what's in it, and what's not. Then I had to figure out just who governs the District of Columbia, anyway, since some of the discussion about traffic problems related to DC. (A congressional committee, more or less.) There seems to have been no coherent national traffic policy up through the Traffic and Motor Safety Bill of 1966, so I'm going to have to look at state and/or municipal level stuff.

It will be hard to get at behind the scenes details of lawmaking at that level. Most of those records are going to be undigitized, and either on microfilm in libraries, or in archives. But I do have access to a couple of historic newspaper databases that should help me get a picture of popular discourse around automobile vs. pedestrian rights. Writing about the social reconstruction of Japanese-Americans from a problem group to a model minority, Stephanie DiAlto describes three venues of action: policy, discourse, and the courts. I hope to use that framework to shape my paper, but policy and courts will be hard to get at directly. Peter Norton's Fighting Traffic gives me a lot of places to start, but he's also already covered some of this ground, which makes me nervous that I'll seem derivative or will rely on him too heavily in the absence of other sources.

I'll likely pick two cities whose newspapers are well represented in the databases I have access to (Chicago and New York City) and comb them for an idea of what was going on. Hopefully there will be some relevant documents in HathiTrust as well; there's all sorts of interesting stuff in there. But other political scientists writing in the field of social construction are citing varieties of sources that I won't be able to lay hands on and sort through in the time frame I have for this paper. So I feel like the whole thing will end up being a little half-assed, but I'll do my best with it.

And I still need to decide on what the heck I'm going to write about for my urban social justice paper! I'm thinking about looking at the construction of highways from the history-society-space perspective that Edward Soja advocated in Seeking Spatial Justice; that was the most influential book I read through that course. But oh, do I feel behind.

The father of an inventor I'm researching worked at the Illinois Central Hosptial for the Insane. While reading about it, I came upon this abhorrent example of a man who had his wife committed because she was "slightly insane." At the time, a man could have his wife committed with no public hearing and without her consent. That's not an exaggeration, or a joke about some fictionalized version of Victorian insane asylums. You could simply just tell them your wife was insane and they'd lock her up. I don't even know what to say. There are no words.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Packard

Packard's "insanity" amounted to a disagreement with her husband's religious and political beliefs and family finances.

The trip to Wegman's from my place is quite doable, even though there are 170 feet or so of climb on the three mile trip. Syracuse has a lot of hills! I couldn't find the Kashi cereal I usually eat, but I fit a four pack of pot pies, two boxes of cereal, a tub of yogurt, and a giant bag of frozen pierogies on my bike. I also found a Papa John's that I'll probably visit later this weekend with the gift card that Posicat gave me.

resonant Paypal'd me some unsolicited money, so I feel a little better about buying decent food. I am cared for. *smiles*

What else? the imported food store has *tons* of different kinds of turkish delight! Melo Velo, the bike shop, is on the second floor of a building in Westcott. It took a little bit to find, but once I did I liked the place. They've bolted a long wooden track all the way up one side of the stairs to make it easier to get people's bikes up. Two people complimented my placards as I was unlocking my bike to leave. It makes me feel like I'm in a place where I fit. And/or like I'm being flirted with by alt-cyclist guys. Either way I'm pleased. *laughs*

The Salvation Army's clothing selection and organization is not the greatest. On my next thrifting trip, I'll probably hit three of them a couple miles west in someplace called Solvay. Maybe tomorrow! I figure I should enjoy getting around more now, before schoolwork and research starts eating all my time. All together I rode about 13 miles today, which still isn't that much for me. Maybe I should ride out to Green Lakes State Park this weekend. I'll get to see some of the Erie Canal trail that way too.

It looks from Wikipedia like Solvay was a company town of sorts for the Solvay Process Company, one of the early major chemical companies in the United States. I love that, like Kenosha, there is so much industrial history here! I really want to read a good history of the area.

A couple interesting pieces of writing on being a pedestrian.

First, a short history of how 'jaywalking' became a crime. Can you imagine what moving through a city or town was like when cars were that which was out of place on a street? When it was a motorist's responsibility to avoid pedestrians? From Vox Magainze, "The forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of "jaywalking"
http://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history

Second, an interesting piece of science-fiction that I found when looking through UW-Parkside's collection of vintage sci-fi pulp magazines. In Amazing Stories, I found this oddly relevant tale of a world where being a pedestrian is illegal. The author writes of the far future, when certain roads had actually been made illegal for pedestrian use, and where people seem to be perpetually driving just to go somewhere, anywhere. Where those who walk are seen as throwbacks to a primitive past.

David Keller's "Revolt of the Pedestrians" was written back in 1928, when automobiles were becoming more and more a part of everyday life. Right in the middle, in fact, of the campaign being waged by auto-makers against pedestrians that the Vox article describes. It begins on page 1048 (the pages were sequentially numbered between issues) of the magazine.
https://archive.org/details/AmazingStoriesVolume02Number11

One of the things that fascinates me about this is the political views that inform these feelings about cars. Wikipedia tells me that Keller is known is a conservative writer. In the present day, this kind of anti-car attitude might be seen as radically progressive. In 1928 though, it would probably have characterized as conservative, and even reactionary. A new paradigm of movement through the city was rising to replace an old one, and Keller was railing against it with his imagined world where motorists run down and kill pedestrians with impunity.

It's amazing how the same political position can mean very different things, and be related to a very different set of *other* political positions, depending on the time and place it occupies.

Rather than give in to temptation and take a nap before my yoga and pilates class, I decided to work on maps for a little over an hour. I got entranced, as I do, and cut my time close to get to the other side of campus. I saved my map project in ArcGIS, figuring that my georeferencing progress on a 1908 Kenosha ward map would be saved. Oh, such optimism. Such bright, misplaced optimism.

These maps are so fun to work with. I can't help but get to know them pretty well as I zoom deeply in over and over to place reference points relating them to a current street layout. I knew that the girl scout camp along 22nd Avenue (I don't think most people here know that there's a Girl Scout camp in Kenosha proper) is on land that used to be something called the Dunneback brick factory (it probably used clay from Pike Creek in its bricks). Turns out that 22nd Avenue along that stretch was called Dunneback Avenue. And there was a tiny little lakefront street called Freshair Avenue running south from the end of what's now 68th Place. Looks like it's the yard of a lakefront mansion now.

And of course, the many long-gone industries and railroad spurs that fed them. The railroad line that led to the brassworks is neat to see. You can still see the remnants of that spur at the trestle over 63rd Street.

I just might take some photos of some of these places when I have time and post them side-by-side with screenshots of old maps, or photos if I can find them.

This new computer is so, so much faster and smoother and just plain better. It was worth the money. Though I probably won't fully get my stuff moved from the old one until after the semester is over.

By the way, this was for sale at the Medieval Times gift shop. Too soon?